The Exorcist Steps. Ninety-seven of them — dropping sixty feet from Prospect Street to M Street below.
Before the movie, people called them the Hitchcock Steps. Not because Alfred Hitchcock ever used them. Just because they looked like something he would.
They were built in eighteen ninety-five for a cable car company called the Capital Traction Company. The company needed a passage between the street up here and the car barn down below. A man named George Killeen built the retaining wall on a handshake deal. He was never paid.
The cable car system lasted less than one year. On September twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety-seven, the company's powerhouse burned down. They replaced the cable cars with horses — temporarily — then went electric. The steps outlasted the entire reason they were built.
The movie. In nineteen seventy-three, William Friedkin filmed a stuntman tumbling down all ninety-seven of those steps. The stuntman's name was Chuck Waters. When asked how he survived the fall,
he said one word. "Zen." Then he clarified — "Complete and total non-resistance."
They lined the steps with half-inch rubber padding. Friedkin was so worried the padding would show on camera that he had the crew repaint the rubber a fresh coat of concrete-gray between takes. He also threw a fifty-thousand-dollar camera down the stairs to get the right angle. Georgetown students climbed onto the
